Washington's largest wildfire in over a decade stalls at 38% containment after five weeks

Rain has slowed the largest wildfire to burn in Washington state in more than a decade, but the Sinlahekin Fire in Okanogan County remained only 38 percent contained on Thursday, five weeks after a lightning strike ignited it in dry grassland west of Tonasket. The fire has scorched roughly 166,000 acres, an area larger than the city of Chicago, and has cost more than $108 million to fight, according to the federal incident tracking system that state and federal agencies use to coordinate the response.

Crews spent this week reinforcing containment lines rather than chasing new flame fronts. Recent showers have left the fire "smoldering and consuming large-diameter woody fuels" in scattered pockets, and officials say no significant spread is expected through the weekend as more wet weather moves into central Washington. Roughly 1,300 firefighters, along with bulldozers, feller bunchers and skidders, remain assigned to the incident, which is still burning across a patchwork of state, federal and private land.

A fire that outran its own predictions

The Sinlahekin Fire began July 26 as a lightning-caused spot fire covering roughly 2,300 acres. It stayed manageable for less than a week. During a "particularly dangerous situation" red flag warning — the first ever issued in Washington, coordinated with the National Interagency Fire Center's daily situation reports — the fire nearly doubled in a single day on August 1, jumping from roughly 32,000 to almost 74,000 acres. It passed 100,000 acres within another three days and topped 150,000 by mid-August, at which point it had become not only the largest fire burning anywhere in Washington that year but one of the ten largest wildfires ever recorded in the state. It still trails the 2014 Carlton Complex fire, which burned 256,000 acres roughly 60 miles to the south and remains the largest single wildfire in Washington history. Officials say roughly 30 structures, a mix of homes and outbuildings, have been destroyed by the Sinlahekin Fire; unlike several other blazes this summer, it has caused no deaths.

One fire inside a record-setting season

The Sinlahekin Fire is the largest piece of what officials describe as one of Washington's most punishing wildfire seasons on record. A fourth consecutive year of statewide drought, combined with a late-July heat dome, primed the landscape for rapid fire growth across the eastern half of the state. On August 1, as the Sinlahekin Fire exploded in size, Governor Bob Ferguson declared a statewide wildfire emergency and imposed a burn ban running through September 30, citing "record-setting drought and high winds" creating dangerous conditions statewide.

By mid-August, wildfires had burned more than 425,000 acres across Washington; by August 20, the statewide total had climbed past 791,000 acres, the third-highest single-season total in state history. A separate cluster of fires around Spokane destroyed more than 700 buildings and forced the evacuation of an estimated 60,000 to 65,000 residents, described by officials as one of the largest single wildfire evacuation events in Washington history. Two deaths have been reported statewide this season, in the Upriver Fire near Spokane and the Chelan Hills Fire, though neither is linked to the Sinlahekin Fire.

The state legislature had doubled the Department of Natural Resources' firefighting budget to $120 million for the fiscal year, anticipating an above-average fire risk after a similarly rough 2025 season. Spending is now on pace to approach or exceed the roughly $286 million the state spent fighting fires the previous fiscal year.

Communities still working through recovery

The fire's early growth forced repeated evacuation orders across a wide stretch of Okanogan County, including the town of Loomis and areas along the Okanogan River between Tonasket and Oroville. Most of those orders have since been downgraded or lifted as the fire's perimeter stabilized, though Okanogan County's emergency management office reports that Chopaka Road remains closed near the Canadian border and that a countywide long-term recovery group is now coordinating cleanup and rebuilding assistance for residents whose property was damaged. The office has asked residents to report fire-related structural damage directly to county emergency managers as officials work to finalize a count of losses.

The Washington National Guard deployed more than 100 members to support fire operations, including helicopter crews used for aerial command and observation — the first time the state has used that aircraft in that role on a wildfire. Command of the incident passed from a regional Northwest Washington team to a California-based incident management team as the fire's scale outgrew local capacity, a shift now common as Western states increasingly share overstretched firefighting resources during simultaneous large fires.

A budget and a workforce under strain

State officials say the broader financial and staffing toll of the season is becoming as significant a story as any single fire. "With the number of large fires that we have this year, the number of destructive fires that we've had this year, we will probably come close to, if not exceed the fiscal year '26 numbers," Department of Natural Resources spokesperson Michael Kelly told the Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review, referring to the state's record fire-suppression spending.

"We're seeing more large and costly fires on the landscape. So you've got to have teams that are out there who can fight those." — Michael Kelly, Washington Department of Natural Resources

What began in early August as a rapid, headline-grabbing expansion has settled into a slower, grinding phase typical of large late-season wildfires: holding lines, mopping up smoldering fuel and waiting out weather. Fire managers caution that containment gains can still reverse if hot, dry, windy conditions return before autumn rains arrive in earnest, a pattern that local reporting on the fire's earlier growth has tracked closely through the summer. For now, officials say full containment of the Sinlahekin Fire remains weeks away, and the statewide burn ban stays in effect through the end of September as Washington works to close out its costliest fire season in years without further losses.